Site Mobile Navigation

Wikipedia Looks Hard at Its Culture

EUGENE KIM left his conference here on Thursday afternoon to visit the Plaza de Mayo, where the mothers of victims of Argentina’s military dictatorship in the 1970s and ’80s march silently, their hair swept under white scarves.

The weekly marches began in 1977 to remember “the disappeared,” those who were snatched and killed by the dictatorship in an attempt to destroy the political opposition. Today, the mothers represent a movement — they are joined by supporters as they march, and there are key chains and T-shirts for sale. People like Mr. Kim come to take photographs.

“They have been professionalized,” Mr. Kim observed. It’s inevitable, he says. He should know; he is in the professionalization business. Or consulting, as it is also known.

His latest client, as of July, is the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization in San Francisco responsible for Wikipedia projects around the world, which is spending $600,000 to create a five-year strategic plan. And the conference he briefly left was the annual Wikimania gathering, held last week in the General San Martín Cultural Center, just off Corrientes Avenue, one of the main arteries of Buenos Aires, and a short subway ride to the Plaza de Mayo.

Photo

Eugene Kim has been hired to come up with a strategic plan for Wikipedia.Credit
Beatrice Murch

He and the other newly hired wiki-consultants tended to stick out. They were a bit older. They were a bit better dressed (O.K., a lot better dressed). They tended to travel in packs of two or three. And they were taking notes. Few had been to this conference before, and they were clearly trying to figure out where to begin in remaking a miraculous project that had become among the top five Web sites in the world, with a total of more than 330 million visitors a month, without the benefit of consultants.

In addition to Mr. Kim, there was Jelly Helm, a former executive creative director at Wieden + Kennedy who worked for clients like Nike before leaving to focus on nonprofit work, and three members of the Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit consulting firm that will help analyze trends within the Wikipedia community.

In a similar role is Matt Halprin, a partner of the Omidyar Network, a “philanthropic investing firm” created by Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, which in August announced a $2 million grant to the foundation over two years. Mr. Halprin, a former vice president at eBay in charge of global trust and security, was just named to the Wikimedia board.



The presence of the wiki-consultants was the most tangible sign of soul-searching among Wikipedians, and certainly at the foundation. Wikipedia has never been more influential but this success has come with burdens — errors or vandalism can resonate around the world, while the largest projects, English Wikipedia and German Wikipedia, were losing steam, adding fewer articles and scaring off potential new contributors. And to a certain temperament, great success naturally leads to the question, how long can it last?

“There is a spirit and culture that is starting to shift,” Mr. Kim said of the need for a strategic plan. “That is a necessary thing. But the question is how do you scale without losing sight of your essence.” A student of collaboration, Mr. Kim, whose consulting business is called Blue Oxen Associates, says any plan will have to “do it the wiki-way.”

“We will put those questions up on the wiki and have them go at it for an extended time and hope that we get something,” he said.

He will be soliciting proposals from the community, which will have its own wiki pages, and Wikipedians are being asked to commit 10 hours a week for four months to join task forces divided by issues of concern.

Jimmy Wales, the public face of the project, was unsparing in his criticism in addressing the conference. “We are mostly male computer geeks,” he stated, adding that there might be a measure of diversity, but only in that “we are from different parts of the world.”

As he spoke, a chart showed the self-reported demographics of Wikipedia contributors — more than 80 percent male, more than 65 percent single, more than 85 percent without children, around 70 percent under the age of 30.

Some Wikipedias are dominated by articles about pop culture, Mr. Wales pointed out, especially Japanese Wikipedia; according to one of his slides, barely 20 percent of the articles on Japanese Wikipedia are about anything else.

More profoundly, he said that Wikipedia was losing sight of its commitment to give everyone in the world a free encyclopedia, particularly people in sub-Saharan Africa. “Is it more important to get to 10 million articles in English, or 10,000 in Wolof?” he asked.

In her speech, Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, was effusive in her praise for all that Wikipedians have created, but she too thought there was reason for concern.

“I believe we are pretty suspicious outsiders,” she said, adding that there were good reasons for that. “We are vulnerable to exploitation — people want to monetize the traffic that comes to Wikipedia, or pursue a political agenda.”

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

“People want to help us,” she said. “We need to open ourselves up to external resources. It is important we open those doors and let those people in.”



Walking through Buenos Aires, Mr. Helm said this was unlike any communications assignment he had taken on. “It is an awesome story to tell, but I have no idea what we’ll do in terms of tactics,” he said. “My hope is that no one will be able to say who did they hire to do this work.”

Mr. Kim said one issue Wikipedians would need to examine would be “the introduction of bureaucratization,” as represented by outsiders like himself. “It is important to me that my participation have a beginning and an end,” he said.